Maj Sjöwall, co-creator of the Martin Beck thrillers that heralded ‘Nordic Noir’ – obituary

Maj Sjöwall, the Swedish writer who has died aged 84, was a pioneer of Scandinavian crime fiction – the genre that came to be known as “Nordic Noir” – as co-creator of the lugubrious policeman Martin Beck.

Beginning with Roseanna (1965), she and her partner Per Wahlöö published 10 Martin Beck novels in as many years. They were usually described as a husband-and-wife team on the jackets of the English editions of their books, but this was perhaps an attempt to protect the sensibilities of readers less liberated than the Swedes: in fact, although they had two children together, they never married.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö defied the traditional British and American resistance to translated fiction, and for many years were the only non-Anglophone crime writers apart from Simenon to build up a real following beyond continental Europe.

The Martin Beck novels were unusual in portraying the police as dogged and dedicated but far from infallible, and in some of the more darkly comic entries in the series – such as Maj Sjöwall’s own favourite, The Locked Room (1972) – they were depicted as farcically incompetent.

Martin Beck himself was a prototype for the dysfunctional policeman who dominates today’s crime fiction, a hapless figure constantly suffering from dyspepsia and colds, and nagged by his wife, whom he eventually divorces.

And yet he is a fine detective because of his rare capacity for empathy. As Maj Sjöwall observed: “He knows it’s not always a very evil person who kills somebody, but people who are victims of something wrong in society. That makes them do things they wouldn’t have done if they weren’t victims themselves.”

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were both Communists, and the series became more tendentious as it progressed; they wanted to portray the reality beneath the “glossy surface” of welfare-state Sweden and show “how the Social Democrats were pushing the country in a more and more bourgeois and Right-wing direction”.

By the time of the final book, The Terrorists (1975), which sees an alienated young woman murder the Swedish prime minister, Beck has begun to question whether he is really doing much more than reinforcing a pernicious social order.

This was always intended to be the finale of the series, but in the event Maj Sjöwall had to complete the last chapters alone, following Per Wahlöö’s death at the age of 48 after a long illness.

Some 30 years after their last book was published, Sjöwall and Wahlöö received renewed attention when the generation of writers who had come after them, now internationally famous thanks to the “Nordic Noir” boom, paid handsome tribute to their influence.

Henning Mankell wrote that “anyone who writes about crime as a reflection of society has been inspired to some extent by what they wrote”. Jo Nesbø declared that every living crime writer stood on their shoulders.

Maj Sjöwall did not return the compliment, however, complaining that modern crime writers concentrated too much on the detectives’ love lives (“It’s like they’re girls’ books, some of them”) and that Mankell’s novels were “boring” and lacked humour.

It was the authors’ ability to combine serious social comment with jet-black comedy that made the Martin Beck novels superior, in the eyes of many readers, to their epigones. As the American novelist Jonathan Franzen put it, Sjöwall and Wahlöö were unique in wedding “the satisfying simplicities of genre fiction to the tragicomic spirit of great literature”.

Maj Sjöwall was born on September 25 1935, the daughter of Will Sjöwall, the manager of a hotel chain, and Margit Trobäck. She was brought up on the top floor of a hotel in Stockholm.

“I was a boyish girl, climbing trees and kicking footballs, but I was very introverted,” she told The Daily Telegraph in 2015. “My mother thought I was crazy. She said: ‘She never talks, she never answers when you talk to her, and she’s very thin, and not very beautiful.’  When she was talking to her friends she called me ‘Professor’.”

Young Maj was beadily observant, and her awareness of the social gulf between the hotel guests and the staff fostered her hatred of inequality.

She had a “rather wild” youth and became pregnant at 21. Her father insisted she have an abortion but instead she married a family friend 20 years her senior and gave birth to a daughter. The marriage was swiftly dissolved, as was a second marriage, to another older man: “I think I had a father complex.”

She worked as a journalist and art director at various newspapers and magazines before going into publishing. In 1962 she met Per Wahlöö, a successful journalist and author who encouraged her to help him with his writing.

“It was not a passionate love story. We met as friends, and found out we thought very much the same way, and at first he was in love with me but I was not in love with him. It took some time.” He was married, but within a year of their meeting he had moved in with her. They had two sons.     

After deciding to collaborate on the Beck novels, they would work through the night after putting the children to bed; having plotted the books together, they worked on alternate chapters, sitting opposite each other and trying to write things that would make the other laugh. “It was a game, it was great fun,” she recalled.

She remembered Wahlöö as a bohemian, eccentric figure who stranded them in London during one holiday after spending all their money on model ships (a hobby he shared with Martin Beck). After half a dozen happy years together he became seriously ill, although they kept to their writing schedule.

Wahlöö discovered he was terminally ill after sneaking a look at his doctor’s notes. He died from an overdose of painkillers in June 1975; Maj Sjöwall never knew if it was deliberate or an accident.

She had subsequent relationships but never remarried. In 1990 she published another thriller, The Woman Who Resembled Greta Garbo, in collaboration with the Dutch writer Tomas Ross. She disliked writing on her own, and latterly worked mainly as a translator.

She eventually left the Communist party, preferring to describe herself as a Socialist, and noted ruefully that the warnings of her books had gone unheeded and Sweden had become a crueller and more materialistic place.

One of the Beck novels, The Laughing Policeman, was made into a film with the action transposed to San Francisco and Walter Matthau in the lead. There were also several Swedish films and a long-running television series, Beck, which was recently a success on BBC Four. All 10 novels were dramatised on Radio 4 in 2012.

Maj Sjöwall made little money from her work, having signed a far from favourable contract in the 1960s, but lived a happily simple and solitary life in the Swedish countryside.

She gamely travelled the world in old age to attend literary festivals after she began to be hailed as “the godmother of Nordic Noir”.

The 50th anniversary of the first Martin Beck novel saw her accompanied on her travels by a Swedish documentary film crew. When asked when filming would be completed, she replied, with typical forthrightness, “they are waiting for the shot of my coffin being carried.”

Maj Sjöwall is survived by her three children.

Maj Sjöwall, born September 25 1935, died April 29 2020